Love

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Miss Vera Brown was the only pretty teacher at Central School, where she taught 5th grade. A boy in her class had a crush on her, thinking that her voice was as"gentle as the expression in her beautiful dark eyes." Her students loved her and left apples and other gifts on her desk. For her birthday they sent her flowers. The students were well-behaved for Miss Brown and hoped she'd be their teacher forever. One day a substitute teacher came instead of Miss Brown. Later, she said that Miss Brown was sick and not coming back for the term. The next fall, the boy found out that Miss Brown was now living with an aunt and uncle on a farm a mile away. He and his friend Benny rode their bikes to see her. An older woman answered the door and led them to Miss Brown. She was in a big double bed propped up on pillows. Her arms were like sticks and there were dark circles around her eyes. She managed a flicker of recognition, but the boy realized that she didn't belong to them anymore, she belonged to her illness. Weeks later the boy read in the Lincoln Evening Courier that Miss Brown had died of tuberculosis, at age 23. Sometimes the boy went with his mother to the cemetery to put flowers on the graves of her parents. The cemetery was so large that it would have been hard to find a grave if you didn't know where it was already. The boy knew, in the way he sometimes knew what was in wrapped packages, that the old aunt who had let them in the house visited the cemetery regularly, bringing flowers, arranging them in such a way as to please the eye of the living and the closed eyes of the dead.